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Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

bloomberg.com

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Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#71

Post by bagacrap »

profeta wrote: post #47
sputknick wrote: post #3

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.

you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software. I doubt they would pay $5 per user. or even a year flat fee. and since they will not pay, you will have to run it on ads. And supporting online/mobile offerings (that do not have their requirement of local client/local logs) will always give you more money. it is a lose/lose situation.

Why do you assume this? How much do you think the industry collectively pays to consultancies each year?

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#72

Post by reDunDantReDund » 

  While Yahoo’s ‘legacy’ Messenger service is 
  recordable for compliance purposes, its new 
  platform, launched in December, isn’t.
UH, HOW'S ABOUT FIXING THAT, AND WHAMOLA?

Seriously. Yahoo! as a brand struggles for post 1999 dot com crash relevance, and it refuses to budge on a single, trivial client-side feature, that requires zero overhead? And not only that, they refuse to do so for a loyal and influential subset of their users?

I shudder to think of the stupid daily stand-ups where lazy bastards fart up reasons not to open up a reasonable portion of their service, at the expense of perhaps the entire service.

...unless, of course, the goal is to loose an albatross, and finally be free of messenger.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#74

Post by curun1r »

tragiclos wrote: post #67
curun1r wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to make them pay or support it with ads. Keep offering it to them for free and make a killing front-running them on commodities trades. Or just trade regular stocks since the whole market seems to move based on the crude prices. Either way, it should be pretty easy for a hedge fund to make way more money from eavesdropping than it costs to run the service. It would be a good way to teach an industry with plen…

I'm sure they can't wait to begin using a chat service that not only has no qualms reading their private communications, but actively undermines their business as well.

That's the whole point. They need to learn the point contracts, SLAs and all that goes along with paying for mission critical software. The fact that they haven't been taken advantage of as I suggested is only due to the benevolence of the provider. If Messenger was bought by an entity that was not so benevolent, they'd learn the value of paying for their mission critical tools very quickly. Because what they're doing now is irresponsible given how much money is involved.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#75

Post by kristjansson »

kchoudhu wrote: post #43
peterkshultz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too expensive. A Bloomberg terminal starts at $24,000. Not using a free IM service like Yahoo's seems like a fiduciary sin.

The financial pain will be many times the cost of a Bloomberg terminal if market participants are unable to provide communications transcripts when regulators come calling.

Per the article, the ability to log chats for compliance purposes is one of the factors keeping the industry on Yahoo's 'legacy' platform.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#76

Post by tchitra »

Doesn't this article feel like it was written for Yahoo's benefit? Since they have a blinded bidding process (See [1]), it seems as if this article could help drum up higher bids. Maybe Yahoo is the anonymous source that provided the "hot tip" about commodity traders on Yahoo Messenger.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-bid...

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#77

Post by gyardley »

angry-hacker wrote: post #52
gyardley wrote: post #23

Once everyone in an industry starts using a particular platform to do business, switching is very very hard. The porn industry still uses ICQ.

Is there a reason or just like with oil it happened? Do you happen to work in the industry?

No, I don't work in the industry - but I have an acquaintance, and if I want to message him, he's rarely on anything but ICQ.

As far as I know it's just 'tradition', like the oil industry - once ICQ hit critical mass it became the de facto standard.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#78

Post by dasil003 »

meric wrote: post #55
MrMullen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you record your conversations (I think you can)? But most importantly, can you use WhatsApp without a cell phone number? It has to be tied to your email address and not a cell phone.

The recorded conversations are gone when you switch devices. They are saved locally and not on the server.

This sort of blew my mind when I discovered it since I often travel with a second phone and realized to my horror that I could not be logged into the same whatsapp from two phones. Is this the promise of a mobile-first app world?

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#79

Post by MagnumOpus »

test_log_5 wrote: post #40
smegel wrote: post #21

> In Geneva, the epicenter of Switzerland’s $21 billion commodity-trading industry, accounting for about one-third of the world’s daily oil transactions That's pretty impressive for a country that has never even been visited by an oil tanker.

Tax rates for commodity transactions are low in comparison to other countries. Starbucks executes all their coffee trading out of Geneva. The commodity trade in Switzerland is as old as the hills.

>old as the hills

About as old as a 166-year-old artificial hillock, yes.

Re: Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive

#80

Post by mahyarm »

dasil003 wrote: post #78
meric wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recorded conversations are gone when you switch devices. They are saved locally and not on the server.

This sort of blew my mind when I discovered it since I often travel with a second phone and realized to my horror that I could not be logged into the same whatsapp from two phones. Is this the promise of a mobile-first app world?

It's the side effect of running a very learn architecture. It also has a side effect of not being able to secretly subpoena your chat history after the fact too. Now with E2E encryption they can't even do that easily.
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